One reason I turn back to premodern philosophies so much is that they often show us questions larger than those generally asked in philosophy today. Especially important among these: “what kind of life should I live?” What sorts of major life decisions should I make? It still surprises me how rarely academic philosophers concern themselves with these questions, when we spend so much time teaching people in their late teens and early twenties – for whom these questions are in the foreground.

Lately in my mind I’ve been tossing around the hypothesis that the answers to the question “What kind of life should I live?” roughly boil down to three – and that each of the three is tied to some sort of metaphysics, a theoretical as well as a practical philosophy:

Asceticism: probably the most common answer in Indian philosophy, this is the favourite answer of the historical Buddha, and many traditions both before him (early Jainism) and after him (the Yoga Sūtras, Advaita Vedānta). It became highly popular in Christianity too, with its monastic traditions and suspicion of worldly desires. Everyday life is suffering, a suffering caused by our everyday desires, which arise from our ignorance of the true good. We need to take ourselves out of that everyday mode of life, to a higher and better way that disciplines those desires – renounce the everyday world, take up the chastity and poverty of a monk. Asceticism usually takes up a metaphysics in which the world as we know it is in some sense unreal, or a poor reflection of a higher reality.

Traditionalism: probably the most popular answer in the history of philosophy, because it tends to accept “common sense,” unlike the other two which make a radical critique of our everyday views. It’s probably argued for most explicitly by Confucius and Hegel, though it’s implicit in oral traditions that preserve older ways of life, such as dharmaśāstra. Here the best life accepts time-tested practices and social conventions, passed down to us by our ancestors. We should start a family and raise children, as our parents did for us; we should do the work that they did, or work that preserves and contributes to the social structures that took so many centuries of others’ effort to build. Epistemologically we want to “save the appearances,” as Aristotle put it: our knowledge starts where it is, and intellectual innovations need above all to make sense of that starting point. In Thomas Kasulis’s terms, traditionalism is likely to take an intimacy orientation, whereas the other two lean toward integrity.

Libertinism: an answer increasingly implicit in modern forms of life. Premoderns who expressed this view (Mozi, Aristippus the Cyrenaic, the Cārvāka-Lokāyata school) usually didn’t stick around for too long; but it has become more and more widespread in the modern era, especially now among the urban educated classes. The view finds its classic expression in Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism: the good is pleasure, full stop, and the best life is one that increases that pleasure. That utilitarians seek to increase others’ pleasure and not merely their own is just a variation within libertinism, as the other-oriented Mahāyāna Buddhists are a variation within asceticism. While Nietzsche scorned pleasure-seeking as such, his emphasis on the aesthetics of life is strong enough to give him close affinities with this position. Libertinism typically relies on an empiricist metaphysics like that of Hume, one which often denies that it is a metaphysics: neither a higher reality nor commonsense tradition is to be trusted. True knowledge is to be found only through our senses – and our senses tell us that pleasure is good and pain is bad.

One frequently finds these positions combined, of course. Classical Christian thought puts together a Jewish traditionalism (affirming the goodness of God’s created order) with a Platonic asceticism (suspecting the goodness of this world in favour of a world to come) – leaning much closer to the asceticism in Augustine and to the traditionalism in Aquinas’s natural law. (The Bhagavad Gītā also combines those two: be a traditionalist on the outside and an ascetic on the inside.) Libertinism has become common enough in the modern age that our common sense tends to mix libertinism and traditionalism, especially in an other-oriented way: left-wing politics is typically about allowing others to seek pleasure as well as maintain their work and family. And asceticism mixes with libertinism above all in Epicurus and his school, who believed that pleasure was the only good – but that the way to get the most pleasure is by isolating oneself in an ascetic community without being pulled around by one’s desires.

I find myself tossing around this categorization a lot because I find some appeal in all three. Practically speaking, libertinism comes very naturally to me, and I do find the goodness of pleasure quite apparent; it is probably the closest to the way of life I have chosen and am choosing. Asceticism also holds a strong appeal to me, especially in Epicurus’s terms: our desires often lead us astray and make us miserable, and we need to find ways to control them. I have decided against the monastic life, but I respect it greatly and note the happiness of those who follow it. By contrast, I’ve usually been suspicious of traditionalism as a practical philosophy, which has seemed like it may be mere self-deception. And yet in theoretical terms, I find myself being most persuaded by traditionalism and its epistemological conservatism, which seems like the best way to take account of the many partial truths offered by different traditions. I suppose all of this is just to say how hopelessly confused my own philosophy feels at the moment, but I hope these reflections are of some value to others who are trying to think life through as well.

Apologies for the giant mess of tags and categories on this post – it seems necessary for such an attempt at a broad generalization over the history of philosophy.

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6 thoughts on “The three basic ways of life”

I am somewhat thrown by your categorization of Mozi as a libertine. Mohism is not hedonistic, nor does it foreground maximization. Its social program is less radical than Confucian portrayals tend to claim, as it aims at a full or proper realization of traditionally-valued roles and relations. (It argues for inclusiveness of moral concern, not equality of treatment.) Early criticisms of Mohism tend to regard it as demanding too much self-sacrifice – placing it more in the “ascetic” category, but an asceticism driven by commitment to sociopolitical ideals.

There are similar brute divisions of “life-path” that emerge from the indigenous Chinese traditions. The most canonical division is between government service and private life; the interplay between the two relates intimately to the dialectic between scare-quoted “Confucianism” and scare-quoted “Daoism”. (With “Daoist” typically characterizing the kinds of endeavors a person pursues when home from work and away from career scrutiny.) This division is very pronounced by the Western Han period, but anxiety about the dangers of public life is evident as far back as the fourth century. If I had to introduce a three-way division based on Warring States thought, it would probably be between (1) committed public life, (2) uncommitted public life, and (3) avoidance of public life. Representatives of (1) would be dedicated reformers, activists, and officials; (3) societal dropouts, hermits, and “plainclothes sages” who work their magic far from government auspices. Remaining socially and professionally engaged while cultivating personal freedom and flexibility is (2), and seems to be the ideal of the more accommodationist strands of Daoism.

I have yet to figure out the metaphysical and epistemological correlates of these positions; those concerns are relatively less prominent in Chinese materials. The general avoidance of metaphysical and epistemological inquiry may render such a life-path scheme less relevant or interesting to contemporary Western audiences, who have grown up surrounded by many traditions invested in such inquiry and tying it to moral recommendations. (Buddhism appears to have pointedly forced that priority on later centuries of Chinese thought.) One difference of the Chinese scheme from your more Indic-driven scheme is the greater role (I allege) of pleasure in the latter. Asceticism and Libertinism represent polar options in dealing with everyday desire and enjoyment; in this light Traditionalism seems like a middle-ground compromise that pays more heed to convention since it does not base its recommendations on a relatively extreme rejection or embrace of pleasure. I think that classical Chinese thought in general pays less theoretical interest to pleasure and desire, and much more attention to questions of a social and political nature. Pleasure is probably of less interest in a tradition with such a corporate and pragmatic focus; it certainly gets discussed, but no thinker seems tempted to base an ethical program on it as a primary consideration. “Pleasure” of course overlaps with concepts like “benefit” or “flourishing”, but these latter concepts are of far greater direct interest to Chinese thinkers.

Fascinating post, Stephen. Thank you. It may send me back to the drawing board on schemes like this for a while – this version may turn out to be “Indo-Eurocentric,” as one SACP colleague put it.

As I was thinking about how this scheme works, I thought about the Indic scheme of four puru??rthas or goals of life, which Michael mentions below: artha (worldly success), k?ma (pleasure), dharma (traditional duty) and mok?a (liberation). The three lifestyles I’ve mentioned correspond quite neatly to k?ma, dharma and mok?a. So a (non-Buddhist) Indic thinker might well ask: what about artha? Mozi, on your account, seems like a thinker who’s more about artha than k?ma… and there are other thinkers who would also seem to fit in such a category. Machiavelli, Ayn Rand, probably Rawls (for whom the good for a state is to maximize material capabilities).

The reason I didn’t include a fourth artha category before is that it didn’t seem to correspond to an epistemological orientation in the way that the others do… although, now that I think about it more, I suspect the thinkers I’ve named often have enough of a reductionist and/or empirical bent that they fit in with the libertines. It might be that the “libertinism” category needs to be renamed and expanded, so that it includes an orientation to worldly achievement and material success as well as an orientation to pleasure. Hmm…

Now that you’re experimenting with expanding the classifications to four, I’m going to try expanding mine to six in the following fashion. There are now two variables. The first variable concerns domain of action in the world, and it takes three values: government service, local society, and private life. The second variable concerns “how” a person goes about acting in these environments, and has two values: committed and uncommitted. So in other words we have un/committed government service, un/committed activity in local society, and un/committed private life. Committed government service is the “default” option for many in the Warring States (interesting contrast to the ascetic default), but when they feel defeated in their ambitions they may settle for committed activity in local society. The latter gets increasingly stressed by the Neo-Confucians, who take much strength from the ancient teaching that government is rooted in immediate personal relations. Confucius himself famously states that he is already contributing to government simply by being a good family man, but it is hard to miss the note of disappointment in passages like these. Uncommitted service in either domain is the preserve of those who, for whatever reason (material, social, personal) wish to participate, but who do not have firm moral opinions and programs to put into effect. Such paths are most prized in Daoist works, which celebrate clueless, accidental, or nonchalant leadership styles, as well as holding that social and professional engagement does not require adherence to a fixed moralistic or procedural outlook. Uncommitted public paths are somewhat subtler than the alternatives, and when the Chinese tradition seeks to regress to a binary division that division is roughly between committed public and generic private. Private life may be committed or uncommitted in the sense that one may or may not have something one systematically seeks to accomplish when alone and undisturbed.

The commitment variable signifies the strength of the Warring States emphasis on pragmatism and adaptation, most extensively explored in those Zhuangzi threads which advise having no particular goals or opinions. I don’t know whether a person’s degree of conviction about priorities and decision-procedures has been considered very systematically in the Indic or Western traditions: it seems like a quintessentially pragmatic question to explore, since it subordinates the opinions a person holds to his ability to get things done in the observable realm. I think this un/committed polarity might prove philosophically fruitful; in its ramifications it reflects arguably the most interesting debates held in early China.

The threefold division of action domain feels more parochial to me. It reflects the overwhelming dominance of central government in the minds of BCE Chinese intellectuals – a hegemony that I’m not sure has much parallel elsewhere. I think that these intellectuals often simply assume the importance of central government in human life, rather than arguing for it; however, that assumption provides an interesting counterpoint to the scheme you offer, which seems heavily individualistic to me.

I am not sure precisely what point I wish to make in labeling the scheme “individualistic” – maybe we can explore this together. It seems to me that the scheme envisions social embedding and physical activity as optional, or at least of secondary theoretical importance. Primary importance goes to pleasure, a quintessentially private experience. The scheme makes me envision a basically self-contained agent who is wondering what to do with himself. To the extent that the agent is reflective, what he reflects on is the role of pleasure in his life, plus abstract epistemological and metaphysical models. Now the self-contained agent who reflects in this way, in a personal condition we may refer to as “stasis”, may be paradigmatic for Western and Indic conceptions of rationality, against which the Chinese scheme presents a contextualized agent who is in constant activity and is interested in understanding the nature and implications of that activity. One of the more interesting theoretical claims I have seen in the recent scholarship is that Chinese thinkers do not envision deliberation as analogous to running through the steps of an argument in one’s head, and subsequently deciding what to do. They understand deliberation as an ongoing response to a continuing process of action – the crucial possibility of “rational stasis” is missing.

OK, Mozi – maybe the Chinese thinker most resistant to being assessed by your scheme! I think if presented with the purusarthas, Mozi would firmly reply that his priorities are dharmic, rather than arthic. The terms would of course shift their meanings slightly if he said this – my point is that he is overwhelmingly committed to moral duty and social responsibility. He does think that part of the activist’s moral duty lies in increasing material prosperity for everybody, but calling this a pursuit of “worldly success” seems wide of the mark. It may be that your scheme makes little room for people committed to public activism. “Traditionalism” implies more than social engagement and responsibility – it implies commitment to a scheme of specific values and practices that is basically just given. The Mohists (as well as the Confucians, but that claim is more controversial) exemplify commitment to strident overhaul of those values and practices, in the name of public well-being. The strident-overhaul types in the Indic tradition seem less likely to follow such a route, being more attracted to asceticism and its attendant theoretical speculation.

Thanks again. You are absolutely right, this is an individualistic scheme. Even though one can be concerned with others in either of the three options (Mahāyāna, Hegel, utilitarianism), it is nevertheless an individual agent envisioned as choosing between the three. In that respect it is situated firmly on the integrity side of things rather than the intimacy side – though traditionalism is effectively an intimacy option. Social embedding is indeed seen as optional – not necessarily in terms of where we come from, but of where we’re going. The ascetic makes it a deliberate choice not to depend on others (food gifts to monks are viewed as something for the giver’s benefit, not the receiver’s; the monk would be okay with starving to death if he needed to).

And I will say, I begin to wonder how helpful an intimacy model is as a general heuristic device, when one is dealing with drastically different cultures. I suppose if one really wanted to avoid “rational stasis” in cross-cultural philosophy, one would not classify the available positions into three (or six) – one would simply try and pick the best from all, merging them into one in a case-by-case kind of bricolage.

I also note that once asceticism becomes an option, some sort of rational stasis – as a prelude to a choice at a single fixed time – seems a necessity. If and when one chooses to be a monk, one decisively rejects the other options; the transition does not happen slowly and smoothly. And if one chooses to marry, that rules out asceticism, for decades at least.

Further considerations: it strikes me that, if I read you right, all the six options you’re presenting may in some respect be options within traditionalism. Certainly they do not seem like ascetic options, since the smallest unit listed is private life understood as family life. But now that I look back on it, I suppose that that’s really the point of your scheme: you’re classifying Warring States thought, which means there aren’t any Buddhists around yet, so asceticism isn’t an issue.

The Warring States thinker who’s not a traditionalist on this score would be Mozi – but I’m not sure he fits your sixfold classification either, does he? Is it “committed government service”? I don’t know much about Mo’s life, but it seems difficult to envision him as a civil servant – too much of a troublemaker!

As for “worldly success”: well, I mean that as the pursuit of the material conditions typically associated with a successful or flourishing life, such as prosperity and honour (as opposed to inner states, like the libertine’s pleasure or the ascetic’s tranquility). But again, one can aim to achieve any of these puru??rthas for others instead of oneself; Marx and Rawls strike me as artha thinkers every bit as much as, say, Ayn Rand is. And Mo seems to fit relatively comfortably in a category with Marx and Rawls.

Amod:
As I read it the broad template of the 4 stages of life is the main one for Sanatana Dharma. Yes, at any stage along the way one may drop out into the ascetic but all forms of being in society are respected. During the initial stages the main spring is the fourfold Dharma, Artha, Kama and Moksha. Rama is presented as the ideal of Dharma and he was a ruler.

It’s part of the ape in us to primarily think in terms of hierarchies. Who is the alpha Buddhist etc.? Attending to the duties of our station in life as it used to be put is perfection and that’s better than progress.

See my reply to Stephen above – the four puru??rthas are intriguing in the light of this classification, since one of the ways I’ve listed neatly corresponds to artha. I wish Indian philosophers had thought more about the puru??rthas: they’re an interesting and surprisingly robust classification which appears a lot throughout the literature, but almost nobody ever theorizes them, ever explains why these are the four aims of life and what that means.

As for the stage model: Patrick Olivelle’s book The ??rama System is really interesting on this. He argues that the four stages of life were a later development; earlier on, the model was that one had a choice between the four, and could pursue it for one’s entire life. There were big conflicts as the stage model was introduced: there’s a Buddhist story where (I think) the Buddha’s father pleads with him to be a king first and then renounce when he’s a grandfather, and the Buddha says “sure, I’ll do that, if you can promise me I won’t get sick, get old or die.”

In general I find the four stages less interesting and helpful than the four aims. The difference between the forest-dweller and the sanny?sin always seems a little nebulous; and k?ma doesn’t really get its place in the scheme, since the householder is conducting himself only according to dharma (with some attention to artha).

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